Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell’s creations are on display at SCAD FASH now and will be there until March 16 next year.
“Sandy Powell’s Dressing the Part: Costume Design for Film” is the debut exhibition of Powell’s work, paying homage to her nearly 40-year film career with more than 70 costumes from films like “Velvet Goldmine,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and “Carol.” Powell began her film career on Derek Jarman’s 1986 film “Caravaggio,” and has won three Academy Awards – for “Shakespeare in Love,” “The Aviator,” and “The Young Victoria.”
The exhibit is set up to feel cinematic, the costumes placed in black boxes and lit from the bottom to evoke the feeling of watching a movie in a theater. The first costume you see is from “Caravaggio,” Powell’s first feature film and the start of her collaboration with English filmmaker Derek Jarman.
“I didn’t know how to make films,” Powell said about her initial time on that set. “I didn’t know what we were doing.” Her time on “Caravaggio” influenced her approach to her work moving forward, she said. It was a very collaborative set – if the scenic artists were done painting, they would come and help make costumes. Everyone pitched in with different departments other than their own.
“It was a lot more like working on a theater project,” Powell said. “ I’d come from theater, but small sort of arthouse theater, where everybody mucked in, and that’s what it was like. I thought that was what filmmaking was like.”
After “Caravaggio,” the exhibit moves on to 1992’s “Orlando,” Powell’s first Oscar nomination and another collaboration with the actress Tilda Swinton (“Caravaggio” was also Swinton’s film debut). SCAD Director of Fashion Exhibitions Rafael Gomes said he believes Swinton might be the most represented actor in the exhibit, but Powell has had a number of collaborators throughout her career, both actor and filmmaker alike – Martin Scorsese, Todd Haynes, Cate Blanchett, and Julianne Moore are just some of the names that pop up over and over again.
Powell said she enjoys working with directors who are very visual. When she first comes onto a new project, she breaks down the script before speaking with the director about their vision. How that vision is expressed can vary from director to director. Scorsese, for instance, sends boxes of books to read and films to watch, she said. She remembers that during her time on “Gangs of New York,” there was a specific detail of a stripe on a collar that he wanted to emulate a certain French film – Powell couldn’t remember what the film was, exactly, but she remembered the stripe.
“I was like, no I don’t know that [movie],” she said. “The next day I get sent the film and have to watch the entire film to find the collar. But, brilliant! You know what I mean?”
Having repeat collaborators over the years also builds up a sense of trust. While working on 2015’s “Carol,” it was imperative to get the titular character’s iconic fur coat exactly right. Powell said they screen tested both a light and dark colored coat. The lighter color was going to be harder to make, but it looked better on actress Cate Blanchett. Director Todd Haynes trusted Powell with that decision, she said.
“The one we actually used, it was pieced together by old bits of vintage coat, simply because I was determined to get the right color fur coat for her,” Powell said. “Because it was Cate [Blanchett] … I just really knew it had to be a pale color coat, and I couldn’t find the right shape coat in the right period in the right color. So it was made from a few different pieces that were old.”
The coat in the exhibit is not the original, but a very close recreation – the original was extremely fragile. Powell said the process that brought the old fur back to its vibrancy weakened the stitching, and it would split almost every day during filming.
This is far from the only time Powell had to be innovative. According to Gomes, Powell’s budget on the Yorgos Lanthimos film “The Favourite” (coincidentally, his favorite of Powell’s work) was not very high. The color palette for that film is much simpler than some of her other period pieces, such as “Shakespeare in Love,” and certain, inexpensive fabrics are made to stand in for others – for example, a cotton, towel-like fabric becomes fur.
“Because we stripped away all the detail and reduced the color palette, it actually didn’t get in the way of the dialogue, which is very dense,” Powell said. “If I’d done that in the way that would be expected of that period, and court costumes as grand as the Elizabethan ones, it would have been too much.”
“Sandy Powell’s Dressing the Part: Costume Design for Film” will run through March 16, 2025. Check out some more photos of the exhibit below.
